‘Ware in the World

If there’s one piece of fatherly advice that my three sons have heard enough times, it’s my admonition that "You don’t live on the west coast of the United States: you live on the east coast of the Pacific Rim. That’s the arena where you’ll be playing." Proof of that proposition can readily be found in the growth of the salesforce.com developer community in India, where Apex Developer Network members outnumber those in all other countries outside the United States.

There’s almost one ADN developer in India for every four in the U.S., with India’s community growing on a hockey-stick curve that really turned upwards at the beginning of July: ADN memberships in India grew as much in that one month as in the four months prior.

India’s surge of on-demand entrepreneurship reminds me of Frederik Pohl’s 1972 novella "The Gold at the Starbow’s End." A key plot device in that story was a study — possibly fictional, possibly not — that found people tending to use everything available to them in solving a problem, even when the best solution only used a subset of those resources. The rest of the story concerned a plan to place a carefully chosen group of talented people in a situation where they would have limited resources but a lot of time to think.